Day 8

18.6 mi / 4.6 mph / 2500 ft. climbing
Home: Nancy’s AirBNB

This day, instead of a bike ride, we would learn some history of this land. Haha, no, we were still doing a bike ride, but halfway up the mountain we made a stop at Willcahuian, a set of stone buildings constructed by the Wari culture (or maybe the earlier Recuay culture), sometime between 700-1100AD. So, some old-ass shit, much earlier than the Inca Empire. It’s rare that we pay for museum entries, but here the ~US$2 tickets were totally worth it, especially since we had the run of the place nearly to ourselves.

The only other visitors were a couple who arrived via a collectivo (shared taxi) alongside us, he from Chile, and she from Idaho. So it was nice to be able to communicate for a bit with someone besides ourselves (our limited Spanish allows us to “get by”, but it’s far from what I would call true “communication”). Coincidentally, she’s also been a nomad (though not bicycle-based) for the last three-and-a-half years.

Half-a-mile up from the main site, there is a secondary site, Ichic Willcahuain, with entry via the same ticket, and since we were riding further up the mountain anyway, we stopped there as well. I’d argue it should be considered the main site, since it has multiple buildings of various sizes and styles, with the largest one nearly as large as the single building at the original site. The walled complex felt much more like a village, so it was easier to conjure images of ancient human activity.

Then it was time to continue riding uphill. Though, let’s first review how we climbed our first 1000 feet. Unlike our previous all-pavement ride, we knew this one would be on gravel, and while that makes it more difficult, practice on gravel was one of our goals. But even getting to the road heading up the mountain was a big challenge, because we chose to take a “direct” route across the eastern edge of Huaraz to get there, rather than diving further down along main roads. That meant we hit city streets with 20% grades (pushing our bikes up them) before we even got to any gravel.

And the gravel was in seriously rough shape. Just a month ago, a flood had torn down the Casca river valley that the road runs up, killing two people and destroying homes (it was apparently caused by a massive rockfall into a glacial lake, which caused the lake to burst out of its containment and come flooding down the river all at once). There were clearly places where flood damage was visible, and where restoration work was underway, but mostly it seemed like the bad road condition predated the flood. Sewer covers in the roadway sometimes stood 6-8 inches above the road surface, indicating how much of the rocks and dirt have eroded over time. We were able to slowly grind up many parts of it, but once we hit a 10% section filled with barking dogs, we were walking the bikes for the next 20 minutes.

Luckily, after Willcahuain, the surface improved significantly, and the grade eased to a reasonable 5%, so it was rideable the rest of the way up. For the first mile, there were even sections of newly-poured concrete, the beginnings of what would be a fancier and wider road than anything else we have seen at these rural elevations. If the placement of such infrastructure wasn’t strange enough, the concrete segments would last for random lengths between 10 to 100 yards, and then be interrupted by 10 to 20 yard sections of old gravel road. And there was no sign of active construction. Very odd, but we weren’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth!

Just as the ride was becoming excellent, some large boulders blocked the road. We parked the bikes and did some investigating on foot, and quickly saw that this was a place where a bridge crossed the river, but the bridge was no longer there. Shit. Often, bikes can get across a river where a car would have no chance, but I clambered a good way up the bank looking for a safe spot, and there was just no chance. The walls of the gorge were just too steep, and even if we could get down to the river level and back up the other side, the water was rushing too swiftly to cross it with bikes.

So the only option was to turn around. It at least explains why we had seen zero vehicles in the previous hour! I may have seen a small “no vehicles” sign down near Willcahuain, but it sure would have been nice to have a clearer alert. And while I was annoyed, Rett was crushed to tears. Our plan had been to continue further up the gravel road until we connected with the paved PE-14A road we had used on our previous excursion, at which point our “work” would be done. So Rett was terrified now that we were forced into returning down the rough, loose, gravel road that we had come up, and she expected that we would essentially need to walk the entire way down. I tried to explain that she would actually be fine riding down the reasonably-packed 5% grade to Willcahuain, and that for the rougher stuff below, we had walked it on the way up anyway, so it wouldn’t be any worse. But she was having none of it. We set up our chairs to eat our lunch, fighting off flies biting our ankles, silently looking at the mountain view.

Now my mood was almost as bad as hers, because in my mind, this unexpected roadblock was nothing compared to what we will face when actually setting off across the Peruvian mountains for real. Today, our bikes are unloaded, it’s still fairly early in the day, and we have a comfortable AirBNB in a well-equipped city to return to. Once departing our Huaraz sanctuary, we’ll need to do major descents on gravel of unknown quality nearly every day, with far less cushion. So if these circumstances cause her this much anguish and pain, I simply won’t be able to endure the woman I love suffering unhappiness worse than this every single day going forward. I didn’t say anything, but at the turnaround, my take was that we should extend our stay in Huaraz for a couple weeks to give us a chance to fully explore the (amazing!) area in relative-comfort, and then return to the less-challenging conditions of the US (or some other country). Because there is no reason to put ourselves through such unhappiness.

We began the descent, and it turns out that I was right and Rett had no problem riding the section back to Willcahuain. While that’s good for the short term, I’m not sure if it’s good for the long term, because her improving mood will cause my resolve to weaken, and I know it will make her more-willing to push us to a place of unhappiness going forward.

Even when we hit the rough stuff, we were still able to ride sections of it, never had any scary slide-outs, and shrunk what had been an hour-long section on the way up to less than 45 minutes. Back in town, near the university, we took a much-needed break in the shade cooling off with frozen-fruit ice-cream cups and watching the highest concentration of stylish young people we’ve seen in Huaraz. That was enough to get us back over the rest of the hills to our sanctuary, where, for better or worse, the anguish from 2000 feet up had evaporated into the clouds.